Weekend Premier League recap
The sun shone down this week on another run of weekend Premier League action. With some teams set to play make-up games in the midweek and others having played in European cup competitions the midweek just gone, squad rotation may very well be the watch word of the day. Nonetheless, there’s plenty to talk about so let’s dive in.
Learning from New Towns
The year was 1946, and following the second world war London lay in ruins. Houses and entire communities had been destroyed by relentless bombing from the Luftwaffe (German Air Force), a solution was needed, with the Labour government under Clement Atlee deciding to put forward an act known as the New Towns Act (1946).
NATO – what is it good for?
Nick Wright reports that for the Atlanticist lobby and its enthusiasts, the Cold War never really ended.
Poetry Corner: Day of the Pawns by Bob Dixon
Day of the Pawns by Bob Dixon
Born into a working-class family in Spennymoor, County durham, Bob Dixon eventually became a school teacher, and then a lecturer in English at Stockwell College of Education, Bromley. He was involved with the left-wing cultural journal Artery in the 1970s, and he wrote three collections of poems, three books on the ways in which children’s attitudes have been shaped by the publishing and manufacturing industries, plus an autobiography, The Wrong. Bob was a life long member of the Communist Party and well-known figure on the left-wing poetry scene, reading at CND rallies and other events.
The youth without ‘Goulash Communism’: the youth of post-socialist Hungary
Hungary since the notorious Hungarian Uprising always had a reformist style of leadership which would become known as Kádárism, after the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP), Janos Kádár. This would see the move of the country’s economy from full state-planning to a focus on self-financing of the Hungarian state’s enterprises and a much slower, incomplete collectivisation process.
The architecture of Irish partition is disintegrating
Nick Wright argues the people of the Irish Republic and their government have had a rude lesson in the politics of inter-imperialist rivalry.
Weekend Premier League recap
All 20 Premier League teams were back in action for a full Friday to Monday gameweek. In a week that included not one but two derby encounters, it wouldn’t just be points on the line for the squads involved but the pride and ability to call their respective cities theirs.
The Tory Kickstart scheme is a joke. We need a real plan to beat youth unemployment
The Tories’ flagship ‘Kickstart’ scheme isn’t a subject that has received a great deal of coverage either in the monopoly media or in the labour movement since it was launched as part of the Summer Budget in 2020. This lack of coverage and awareness might be surprising given that it is being touted as the Tories silver bullet to spiralling youth unemployment resulting from the pandemic. In fact, it is really their only significant policy in terms of youth unemployment. But there is a good reason you probably haven’t heard much about it since the scheme was launched. Despite all the government spin, it has been a complete failure.
Trump hysteria ends in anti-climax
Under Biden, as before, we need the broadest possible class-conscious coalition against the capitalist machine that intends to march the US and the world into more war and poverty — singling out Trump as a ‘fascist’ aberration only hinders that task, writes Nick Wright.
Poetry Corner: The Men by Pablo Neruda
The Men by Pablo Neruda, translation by Alfred Yankauer
Pablo Neruda was a prominent Chilean Communist, as well as a Nobel prize-winning poet in both literature and peace. Neruda played key roles in two Chilean governments and experienced the outlawing of Communism in 1948 and later became a close adviser to the Socialist President Salvador Allende only to die in hospital of cancer at the time of Pinochet’s US-backed coup. Better known nowadays only for his poetry, he was a hugely popular poet in Chile at the time and remains popular throughout the world today.
